I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way…

Archive for November, 2012

I remember having one of those wow-moments reading the book The Google Story. One of the Google brains was saying that when facing a problem he couldn’t solve, he liked to redefine it into one which he had a solution for. The example he gave was the classic prime number problem, where you have to tell whether or not a number is prime. From a computer processing time point of view, it can be very demanding, even impossible to solve within an acceptable amount of time. So he redefined the problem into one where you had to state whether or not a number had 99.99% of chances of being prime, and that problem, he could easily solve. I thought it was a pretty clever thing to do.